George Bills
Teach sociology and anthropology at Bluegrass Community and Technical College
Materialism. Materialism is a form of philosophical monism which holds that matter is the fundamental substance in nature, and that all phenomena, including mental phenomena and consciousness, are the result of material interactions. Materialism is closely related to physicalism; the view that all that exists is ultimately physical.
Philosophical physicalism has evolved from materialism with the discoveries of the physical sciences to incorporate more sophisticated notions of physicality than mere ordinary matter, such as: spacetime, physical energies and forces, dark matter, and so on. Thus the term "physicalism" is preferred over "materialism" by some, while others use the terms as if they are synonymous. Overview[edit] Despite the large number of philosophical schools and subtle nuances between many,[1][2][3] all philosophies are said to fall into one of two primary categories, which are defined in contrast to each other: Idealism, and materialism.
History[edit] Axial Age[edit] Common Era[edit] Slaying Zombie Capitalism | The Daily Crowd. As my title indicates, when I began forming my thoughts for this blog I was especially interested in the recent use of zombie capitalism as a financial metaphor, one surprisingly adopted by many financial sources, including the likes of the Financial Times and Bloomberg News.
The suggestive consonance between the zombie-time of the undead and the zombie-time of state-supported banks, state-created ‘bad’ banks, and chronic propping of bankrupt firms has selectively signified the global economy after the AIG rescue. At the widest scale, my invocation of zombie capitalism here tests the temporal disjunctions between the massive credit structures propping up the global economy, particularly by the central banks of the US, UK, EU, Japan, and China, and the slow, uneven growth in the wage economy, or what sometimes gets called the ‘real economy.’ (Source) The second temporal crisis of zombie capitalism speaks to its dominant use as a financial metaphor in the Financial Times and Bloomberg. What are the roots of capitalist crisis? THE PASSING of the British revolutionary socialist Chris Harman in late 2009 was a loss not only to those of us who knew and learned from him, but also for the many thousands of socialists his writings had helped to educate in his 50 years in the workers’ movement.
The range of Harman’s contributions—from revolutionary history to philosophy to political analysis and more, mostly accomplished while working as editor of a weekly newspaper—were an unparalleled contribution to the International Socialist tradition in which theISR stands. Some of Harman’s most important work was his development of Marxist economic theory. He had some formal training in the field: Harman famously misplaced his PhD dissertation written at the London School of Economics.
Some of this writing was unavoidably technical. In today’s protracted economic crisis, Harman’s sudden and untimely death is felt all the more keenly. But labor, particularly unpaid labor, is the source of profit. From long boom to long crisis? The Arrival of Zombie-Capitalism | The End of Capitalism. The following essay was written for and performed at a spoken word event on Nov. 15 in Philadelphia. Enjoy! [alex] “A specter is haunting Europe; the specter of zombie-ism.” – Zombie Karl Marx Art by guitarbri.
Still from the film “They Live.” Why has the archetype of the zombie been so ever-present in pop culture over the last five years or so? Is it just a passing fad, like Justin Bieber’s latest hairstyle or the eye-rolling annoyance of YOLO? But beyond detachment and doom, could our obsession with the undead reflect the reality of the state of institutional decay, political futility, and economic stagnation the world as a whole is struggling to wade through, like some pungent swamp that won’t release its brambles from our ankles? I submit that the answer is all that and more. And yes, this is a hopeful theory, more hopeful than almost anything else a left-wing radical like myself is likely to propose to you in this day and age.
Definitions Zombies It’s dead. Capitalism Zombie-Capitalism. Zombie Capitalism. Book Review by Jonny Jones, July 2009 Chris Harman, Bookmarks Publications; £16.99 Lenin once wrote of politics, "There are decades when nothing happens; and there are weeks when decades happen. " For people around the world, rich and poor, young and old, this statement could rarely have rung more true than late in 2008 when the economic orthodoxy came down to earth with an almighty bump. From Margaret Thatcher's insistence that "there is no alternative" to neoliberal capitalism to George Bush Senior's talk of a "new world order" our rulers had insisted that the untrammelled free market represented the best, indeed the only, way of creating a prosperous society for a generation. These illusions were decisively shattered in 2008. In the wake of these massive upheavals, Chris Harman's new book Zombie Capitalism is both timely and hugely valuable.
The first three chapters set out Karl Marx's basic concepts. These chapters are among the strongest in the book. Comments? Contents. Chris Harman: Zombie capitalism (27 June 2009) MIA > Archive > Harman (27 June 2009) From Socialist Worker, No.2157, 27 June 2009. Copied with thanks from the Socialist Worker Website. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Your new book about the economic crisis is called Zombie Capitalism. What is this? Some commentators are using the term “zombie banks” to describe a situation in which the banking system is seizing up and having adverse effects on everything around it. A zombie bank is worthless but it continues to operate because of government support. I thought it was appropriate to use the term “zombie capitalism” to describe the system as a whole. My new book looks at how the theories of Karl Marx can explain why crisis is endemic to the system.
Marx referred to capitalism as the domination of the dead over the living, the past over the present. Workers have no control over what they produce, how they produce it, how much they produce or what happens to the goods once they have been made. No one knows. We Live in an Era of Zombie Politics: Bill Moyers Interviews Henry Giroux. Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com/Ryan Jorgensen - Jorgo November 22, 2013 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email.
This interview originally appeared on Moyers & Company, and is crossposted here with permission. In his book, Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism, author and scholar Henry Giroux connects the dots to prove his theory that our current system is informed by a “machinery of social and civil death” that chills “any vestige of a robust democracy.” Giroux explains that such a machine produces “people who are basically so caught up with surviving that they become like the walking dead—they lose their sense of agency, they lose their homes, they lose their jobs.”
What’s more, Giroux points out, the system that creates this vacuum has little to do with expanding the meaning and the substance of democracy itself. Full transcript of the interview with Giroux below the video: Zombie Politics and Other Late Modern Monstrosities in the Age of Disposability. Monsters of disaster are special kinds of divine warning. They are harbingers of things we do not want to face, of catastrophes, and we fear they will bring such events upon us by coming to us. - Jane Anna Gordon and Lewis R. Gordon[2] At present, Americans are fascinated by a particular kind of monstrosity, by vampires and zombies condemned to live an eternity by feeding off the souls of the living.
The preoccupation with such parasitic relations speaks uncannily to the threat most Americans perceive from the shameless blood lust of contemporary captains of industry, which Matt Taibbi, a writer for Rolling Stone, has aptly described as "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. " [3] Media culture, as the enormous popularity of the Twilight franchise and HBO's True Blood reveal, is nonetheless enchanted by this seductive force of such omnipotent beings. Henry Giroux Interviewed by Peter B.
ZOMBIE POLITICS - WHO IS RESPONSIBLE ? - HENRY GIROUX. Henry Giroux currently holds the Global TV Network Chair Professorship in the English and Cultural Studies Department at McMaster University and is a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson University, both in Canada. Giroux's work centers around cultural studies, youth, democratic theory, public education and the politics of higher education. Giroux is familiar with many of those topics due to his decades of experience teaching America's youth, beginning as a high school history teacher in Barrington, Rhode Island in 1968 and working his way through teaching jobs at prestigious institutions like Boston University, Tufts, Northeastern University and serving as the Waterbury Chair in Secondary Education at Penn State University.
His two most recent books are Neoliberalism's War on Higher Education which will be published in December 2013 and The Violence of Organized Forgetting: Thinking Beyond America's Disimagination Machine which will be released the following year. We Are In a Class War | Portside. The struggle of working Americans takes center stage as Black Friday protests cover the country. The struggle for wages that do not leave families impoverished is one that affects us all and highlights the unfair economy created by a class war waged by the wealthy for decades. The ‘Walmartization’ of the US economy has created a downward spiral in wages and destroyed small businesses and communities while heightening the wealth divide that is at the root of so many problems. The people are fighting back and the elites recognize it. There is fear in the investor class as they see people organizing and mobilizing.
Corporations are now investing more time and money in preparation to protect themselves from investor actions and legal challenges. The actions of corporations and governments against the people are a sign of their fear, and a sign of our unrealized strength. Active Fronts of Struggle in the Class War There are many active fronts of struggle. A Cultural Transformation. Viva Mabuse #45: Zombie Agonistes | SUNDANCE NOW. By Michael Atkinson Having now willingly seen World War Z—an experience not unlike watching a lazily dry-docked ocean liner list to one side and tip slowly, disastrously over—I have to ask: what the fuck? How did we get here? Why are zombies—almost without variation the same zombies George Romero came up with over a tumbler of bourbon in Pittsburgh some 45 years ago—literally everywhere? Doesn’t anyone else think that anything called a “zombie craze” (as if it’s a dance step) is more than a little strange and a little worrisome, especially when it permeates our visible culture as pervasively as this?
It seems as though the apocalypse has already arrived, but as a suffocating cataract of nonsensical, necro-obsessive, brain-washed anti-culture, from which there has proven to be no effective escape. Zombie culture looks to me like a wasteland of imagination-free pandering. As it happens, I’m not alone out here in the wilderness. College Quarterly - Reviews - Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism. College Quarterly Winter 2012 - Volume 15 Number 1 Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism Henry A.
Giroux New York: Peter Lang, 2011 Reviewed by Howard A. Henry A. Four years ago, a small group of teachers … well, OK, one other one and I … were grousing about the dearth of formal intellectual discourse at our college and, for some undeclared reason, we decided to help fix the problem. The evening went well. For those who do not know or know of him, David had a fascinating career. My colleague and I were so jazzed by Noble's talk and the reception it received that we approached the administration about sponsoring a full-day conference, to be called the Faculty Forum. In this instance, Henry A. I'd say that the book currently under review, Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism, is his latest, but there are probably several more in print or in process, with others to follow. Like most dangerous people, Henry A. I mentioned his "project.
" Henry A. COMMENT: Liberals Suck, Conservatives Are Morons … Any Questions? (part I of II) :: Bowlby Less Traveled (BLT) Zombie Apocalypse? | Trauma and the Human Condition - Blog by Anngwyn St. Just. “I think Zombies have always been an easy metaphor for hard times because they’re this big faceless, brainless group of evil things that will work tirelessly to destroy you and think of nothing else. (Seth Grahame Smith, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies) “The term clinical depression finds its way into too many conversations these days. One has a sense that a catastrophe has occurred in the psychic landscape.” (Leonard Cohen) “We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones”. Growing up here in the Northern Hemisphere, I have always relished this bittersweet month of October, with its botanical blaze of glory preceding our inevitable and decidedly less colorful November snows.
In Haitian culture, zombies (zonbi = spirit of the dead) are believed to be animated corpses, raised by magical means, controlled by another, and used as slaves possessing no will of their own. In a political sense the term can also apply to a mindless adherence to authority. Dead among the Living: Zombie Politics in the Age of Casino Capitalism. Zombie values find expression in an aesthetic that is aired daily in the mainstream media, a visual landscape filled with the spectacle of destruction and decay wrought by human parasites in the form of abandoned houses, cars, gutted cities and trashed businesses.— Henry Giroux Zombie culture hates big government, a euphemism for the social state, but loves big corporations and is infatuated with the ideology that, in zombieland, unregulated banks, insurance companies, and other megacorporations should make major decisions not only about governing society but also about who is privileged and who is disposable, who should live and who should die.— Giroux The storms have been gathering for a few years now, and in one tidal wave centuries-old institutions, traditions, and values are being leveled out of existence, washed over by the roaring seas of neoliberalism.
Michigan’s Tea Party governor dared to dream bigger. Power is insecure, he also notes. New York Times Uncovers Conservative Attacks, Then Prints One: All on Front Page. Truthout doesn’t take corporate funding - that’s how we’re able to confront the forces of greed and regression, with no strings attached. Instead, we need your support: Make a donation today by clicking here. The New York Times has many virtues and some important flaws. Both were evident on the paper's front page in late November 2013, and there is a lot to be learned by what did and did not appear there.
For decades, Republican conservatives have constructed and carried out extensive, well-planned, long-term communication campaigns to change public discourse and the way the public thinks. It has been done very effectively and, for the most part, not secretly. The New York Times finally began reporting on this effort on Thursday, November 21, in a fine piece by Jonathan Weisman and Sheryl Gay Stolberg. It's a start, and it's about time.
I do mean changing brains. At least, The Times did get an important part of it right Thursday, and we should be grateful. Ms. Parties, Causes and Political Power. Preparedness 101: Zombie Apocalypse. The scientific way to survive the zombie apocalypse. How to Survive a Zombie Apocalypse: A Beginners Guide. Loweded, "Plans are pointless. Staying alive's as good as it gets." Zombie Outbreak Guide Zombie Apocalypse Survival Guide -Zombie Outbreak Guide. What would a real zombie outbreak look like? - Health. On the Origin of Zombies. CDC Claims 'Zombie Virus' Not a Real Thing as Cannibal Attacks Continue. Inside zombie brains: Sci-fi teaches science. The Virus - All The Tropes. What a 30,000-Year-Old Giant Zombie Virus Means For the Future. "Zombie Virus" Possible via Rabies-Flu Hybrid?
Rage virus - Zombie Wiki - Zombies, Undead, Survival Guide. 5 real diseases that could make you act just like a zombie. 11 ways the world could end: Zombies. Solanum - Zombie Wiki - Zombies, Undead, Survival Guide. H1Z1 Zombie Virus The Next Big Thing In Post-Apocalyptic Zombie Gaming! Rumors Say Player Can Only Die Once In A Massive Online Map! : Trending News.
Zombie Computer Virus - Botnet Malware | Antivirus.com. The Komodo Dead: What Really Kills in The Walking Dead. Zombie Virus Could Be A Reality: Exclusive. ‘The Walking Dead’ Zombie Virus Makes More Sense As Venom - But Not Simpler | DiscoverMagazine.com : But Not Simpler. You're More Likely to Die from Brain-Eating Parasites, Alcoholism, Obesity, Medical Errors, Risky Sexual Behavior or Just About Anything OTHER THAN Terrorism Washington. The True Odds of Airborne Terror Chart. Odds of Dying by Terrorist Attack: 20,000,000 to 1. CHART: 17 Years After Oklahoma City Bombing, Right-Wing Extremism Is Significant Domestic Terror Threat. Does a Zombie Virus strain Exist? | Beyond Science. Portland State Inside PSU | Zombie Virus research could save lives and money. Zombies, Sin, and Salvation | Strange Notions. Maps of Seven Deadly Sins in America. Zombie Bible.
Original sin. The Christian Doctrine of Original Sin. Concupiscence. Christian views on poverty and wealth. Fr. Robert Barron's Word On Fire - "World War Z" and the Council of Trent. God & culture: Fighting zombies—and our own fears. A history of zombies in America. Idealism. What Does the Zombie Genre Say about the Modern West? - Rw005g. Utopian and dystopian fiction. Rick Altman’s “A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre” « Cinema, Etc. The Dead Things We Already Are: Pod People, Body Snatching, and the Horrors of Business as Usual. Fredric Jameson: The Utopic/Dystopic Imagination | noir ecologies. Freud and the Zombie Apocalypse. Metaphorical Zombies and Functional Activists. For Interpretative Sophistication at the Intersection between Social and Aesthetic Practices | Iratxe Jaio + Klaas van Gorkum.
Zombies: Apocalypse or Rebellion? Michael Gilmour: Top 10 Zombie Scenes in the Bible. GEORGE A. ROMERO'S LAND OF THE DEAD. How did movie zombies get so fast? Pity Poor Flesh. Touched by a Zombie: Warm Bodies, ParaNorman - Bright Lights Film Journal. Dialectic. Sociology Of Zombies by Stefen Adams on Prezi. Sociology Of Monsters 1. Teaching sociology through the zombie apocalypse | Legally Sociable.
Capital, Labour and Class Struggle. The Rules. Poverty Has a Creation Story: Let's Tell It. The Culture of Poverty and Zombies. Zombies and Ideology. The Zombie Manifesto: Marx & The Walking Dead | SociologyInFocus. The Age of Political Psychosis | Jed Morey. Zombies, Technology, Capitalism | Digitalscholarship Blog. Thoughts on Zombies and Sociology | Compromise and Conceit. Freire Project | Henry A. Giroux | The Spectacle of Illiteracy and the Crisis of Democracy.
Todd Platts | The Bruce Scribes. The Civilizational Significance of Zombies - Michael Vlahos. » CfP: What are zombies and why are they now so prevalent across both pop culture and academia? The Sociological Imagination. Towards a sociology of living death | Code and Culture. Zombie Sociology. Sociology of the Zombie Apocalypse | ZeeZee's Corner: Sociology of Everything.
Sociology for Nerds: Guest Post: Gender Roles in Zombie Films: Part 1. Zombie’s transformation of the self | Sociological Theory // I Heart Sociology. Zombie Sociology. Why Can’t the Zombie-Focused Sociologist Get a Job? by Daniel Luzer. THE BOOK | Zombies in the Academy. Zombie Research | Zombies in the Academy. The American Fascination With Zombies | Anthropology in Practice. The Concept of a Zombie | Scholardarity. War and Social Upheaval Cause Spikes in Zombie Movie Production. ‘Zombies’ protest privatization outside president’s office. Giroux on the War on the Young. Three-D Issue 21: Terminal Thinking: Corporate University and Creativity | MeCCSA.